For the xth time, I’ve hit the MySQL bug #51325 - It state that with relatively big (>5 gigs) innodb buffer_pool (my.cnf::innodb_buffer_pool_size), the LRU invalidation on ‘DROP TABLE’ (or ‘TRUNCATE TABLE’) will lock the full table (even if DROP or TRUNCATE is on a partition). Bug is only present when using the ‘innodb_file_per_table‘, which is kind of sad because I love that configuration setting.
Solutions include disabling the innodb_file_per_table setting & reducing the buffer_pool size…